History & Persons

Egor Yakovlev09.02.2025

Sergio Leone’s ‘900 Days’ — The Story of a Grand Project on the Siege of Leningrad. Sergio Leone, the author of the best Western films in history, was not very popular in the USSR. Soviet film critics criticized the Italian director for the aestheticization of violence, caustic irony and the lack of a moral compass […]

Vladimir Golstein04.02.2025

What a strange deja vu one experiences reading Tchaikovsky’s letters provoked by Russian confrontation with Ottoman Empire in defense of Bulgarians and Serbs, butchered by the Turks for their rebellion. For a while, western press, led by British, didn’t want to hear anything bad about Turks or anything good about their victims or the Russians […]

Egor Yakovlev03.02.2025

On April 30, 1945, street fighting was at its height in Nazi Berlin. Soviet troops were preparing to storm the Tiergarten district, which was defended by the SS. Both soldiers and civilians were dying in the bloody meat grinder in the center of the densely populated city. On this day, Red Army sergeant Nikolai Masalov, […]

Alexander Palladin01.02.2025

As I mentioned recently in my The End of an Era previous piece, in October of 1990, I got an offer to head the Presidential Information Service (PIS) post, reporting directly to Valery Ivanovich Boldin, Chief of Staff of the USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev. Each morning we would prepare digests of the latest mass media […]

Yuri Chekalin30.01.2025

Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev first met in person in 1855 in St. Petersburg. Before that, they had already known each other in absentia through friendly letters to each other and through published works. Ivan Sergeevich was 10 years older than Leo Nikolayevich and, at the time of their first meeting, was the most famous […]

Alexander Palladin28.01.2025

On January 27, 1944, the military blockade of Leningrad, the 2nd largest city in the USSR, by German and Finnish troops was finally broken. It lasted for 872 days and ranks as the longest and most lethal siege in world history, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths. Some historians speak of the siege operations in […]

Yuri Chekalin27.01.2025

German worker August Landmesser, whose wife was Jewish, refused to salute Hitler. This famous photograph was taken in 1936. The photo shows workers giving the Nazi salute during the launch of the training ship Horst Wessel. Only August Landmesser crossed his arms instead of saluting. This photograph is a historical document of that era when […]

Yuri Chekalin26.01.2025

Traffic control is a difficult task, but, if necessary, even a baboon can do it. Can a baboon be trained to manage the passing trains? Yes, with the help of a human friend! Railway signalman James Wide, who lost both his legs in an accident on the job and was forced to use awkward prosthetics, […]

Yuri Chekalin23.01.2025

Did the Bolsheviks Install a Monument to Judas? Part 1. To understand the absurdity, I will allow myself to cite Henning Kehler’s “memories” from his book “The Red Garden” published in 1921. It is full of artistic inventions, as the author himself admitted (“the memories are artistically processed, condensed and enhanced. Each of them contains […]

Yuri Chekalin22.01.2025

The legend about the installation of the monument to Judas in Sviyazhsk has been known for a long time. It would seem that enough has been said about its sources, but there are, as they say, details. Quite interesting to pass by. So, the legend is that after the Red Army soldiers arrived in Sviyazhsk […]

Sergio Leone’s ‘900 Days’

The More Things Change!

Prototype on the Liberator Soldier monument in Berlin

Eyewitness Report on August ’91 Events At Kremlin

Why Did Tolstoy Challenge Turgenev to a Duel?

German and Finnish Siege Could Not Silence The Voice of Leningrad

The Man Who Refused to Salute Hitler

Baboon Railwayman

Did the Bolsheviks Install a Monument to Judas? Part 2.

Did the Bolsheviks Install a Monument to Judas? Part 1.

Yeltsin’s Betrayal of the Residents of Crimea

The SCO Summit Was Far from Fruitless

160 Years Since the Opening of the First Congress of the First International

How Schools Are Teaching Children Not to Read